I met RMS at the Atlanta Linux Showcase in 1998. In the area with vendor booths in the lobby area of the show, he had laid down a blanket and was sitting in the middle with his legs crossed. He had printed copies of man pages printed and stapled together with covers laid out in front of him.

I walked up and introduced myself and said that I was a big fan, appreciated his hard work, etc. He looked at me coldly and just said "so are you going to buy something?" and motioned toward the booklets. I didn't need a printed copy of the `sed` man page so I shrugged and he seemed quite annoyed, turned to his assistant with a notebook computer and started dictating something to them, as almost to make it clear that our interaction was over.

I'm not sure what the point of posting this is, but that's my RMS story - it was my first "never meet your heroes" moment, I guess.

"I don't know how to make a screenshot" - what a fucking star.

On the contrary, I think that was a wonderful answer and reflects the POV well. Hard to imagine something more Stallman-esque!

"I don't know how to make a screenshot"

Linus Torvalds often says that he does not know how to do X (like install a Linux distribution, or other simple stuff). I wager that it's a status thing.

He’s…something.

The Trisquel website has some screenshots. The 7.0 LTS is from 2014 so it's likely he was probably running something like this: https://trisquel.info/en/7.0-screenshots

Aqua-era OS X is the best looking out of the box desktop environment in the entire history of computing, and given 1) the lack of interest everyone seems to have in the desktop these days and 2) the directions in which the few remaining contenders are headed, I wouldn’t be surprised if it remained that way for a long time.

It’d be fun, as a side project, to build a pixel perfect replica of it (along with the core apps that make it useful) that runs on a modern Linux kernel and preserve it in amber forever.

Same for me, until I got to Bram.

Wild how well it would fit with CL LLMs in 2025

Most screenshots for these well known guys are quite boring. Coincidence? I think if you want to be good at something you need focus.

I once asked a YC alum, "Got any good Paul Graham stories?" And he had a couple; apparently the dude would often ask for help with basic tech things like setting up his wireless. Same kind of thing, I guess.

I don't know why people take him so seriously. He said some decent things about software freedom, and the rest of his entire existence seems to be him being deliberately obtuse and generally off-putting. I find it bizarre that there's this strange carve-out here for him, especially considering that he would absolutely loathe 99% of the software that gets discussed here.

See also: Knuth. Literally wrote the book on algorithms, but barely is able to do more than open a window in FVWM.

It's been well known for awhile now that it's his preferred setup.

He seems to want as much stability as possible; while being as minimal as possible; with as little fuss to install and keep up to date as possible. Fedora meets those needs. Gnome is Fedora's main concentration.

He seems to switch every half-decade or so. Waiting for his next KDE era :-)

He said also because fedora seemed the most amenable to running custom kernels which is basically what he does all day.

Yeah mine too (but using Silverblue).

After spending years with Arch/NixOS/Ubuntu/Sway Im quite happy with Fedora+GNOME now. It just works.

I think you mean 2002, not 2022.

Mine is unchanged since I switched from DOS (Borland) to Windows (Visual C++/Visual Studio) development in 1995. If I sat 1995 me down in front of my PC it wouldn't take more than a couple of mins to figure everything out. He'd be confused about all the AI panes on the dev apps, though, I suspect.

(I've also never had a window tiled in my life; every window maximized at all times to avoid noise)

Hah, If you ask my partner, I've been looking at the same screen for years and years

What are you echoing?

And that hasn't changed much since. At work and at home, I'm usually looking at emacs with no tab or menu bar, full screen on all monitors, with everything else (browser, etc) a virtual desktop switch away: exwm at home, one terminal emacsclient in ssh per monitor with a single daemon on linux server (accessed from Windows) at work. With many minor variations this is how my desktop has looked since my first programming job, which coincidentally was in 2002, but the details of the setup have changed a lot. The bit that has remained constant is that all I want on my monitor(s) when I'm programming is code.

Edit: Probably the most visible change is better fonts and font rendering.

Edit 2: To expand on "all I want is code": let's say there is a menu bar with maybe 10 menus and 100 or so items, and a project navigator thingy, and a compiler output window. I would much rather these things not take up permanent space on my screen. Every one of them shows information/commands that I can access with a key combination and in some cases some fuzzy completion after hitting a key combination. Any decent editor can do this and you can learn it in an afternoon, and if you're going to spend the next couple of decades in front of it it's worth getting rid of the pixels permanently allocated to advertising "you can do this thing".

I think I see only one truly tiled layout. But yes, "terminals and editors" as the core developer workflow is extremely conserved over time. It dates from the mid 80's on Sun 2's and really hasn't changed much in four decades.

It's probably not worth arguing whether this is the "best" when compared with vscode+LSP+Claude or whatever happens to be en vogue in the moment.

But terminals and editors is sticky in a way that tells me it's probably close to optimal. Those of us in the cult aren't observed to leave the compound except in extremely rare circumstances. I'll be doing the same stuff on my death bed, likely.

If you want a macOS/OS X release with soul, check out Snow Leopard.

The one in the FVWM screenshot is FvwmPager. It comes with FVWM.

Jordan's the rapscallion who scribbled all over Dennis G. Perry's Interleaf windows (program manager of the Arpanet in the Information Science and Technology Office of DARPA) with his infamous global rwall on March 31, 1987.

Milo Medin said "Dennis was absolutely livid, and I recall him saying something about shutting off UCB's PSN ports if this happened again."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31822138

    From: Milo S. Medin <medin@orion.arpa>
    Date: Apr 6, 1987, 5:06 AM

    Actually, Dennis Perry is the head of DARPA/IPTO, not a pencil pusher
    in the IG's office.  IPTO is the part of DARPA that deals with all
    CS issues (including funding for ARPANET, BSD, MACH, SDINET, etc...).
    Calling him part of the IG's office on the TCP/IP list probably didn't
    win you any favors.  Coincidentally I was at a meeting at the Pentagon
    last Thursday that Dennis was at, along with Mike Corrigan (the man
    at DoD/OSD responsible for all of DDN), and a couple other such types
    discussing Internet management issues, when your little incident
    came up.  Dennis was absolutely livid, and I recall him saying something
    about shutting off UCB's PSN ports if this happened again.  There were
    also reports about the DCA management types really putting on the heat
    about turning on Mailbridge filtering now and not after the buttergates
    are deployed.  I don't know if Mike St. Johns and company can hold them
    off much longer.  Sigh...  Mike Corrigan mentioned that this was the sort
    of thing that gets networks shut off.  You really pissed off the wrong
    people with this move! 

    Dennis also called up some VP at SUN and demanded this hole
    be patched in the next release.  People generally pay attention
    to such people.

                                            Milo

Out of curiosity, why's xorg a blocker for you?